The Forgotten SoldierEssay Preview: The Forgotten SoldierReport this essayWar is a breeding ground for fear, and fear in turn is a sharp strangler of innocence and moral structure. This is Guy Sajers experience–rather than a war of man reaching unimagined peaks of bravery, his account of WWII in his memoir, The Forgotten Soldier, is a bombardment of confusion, terror, and uncertainty. One of his most striking images of the nature of war and its impact on the human condition is captured, ironically, not in any atrocity imparted on a fellow soldier or refugee, but rather in the briefly mentioned, marginal demise of an animal. During an anxious two-day wait for passage off the Hela Peninsula, Sajer chooses to provide only one anecdote, which turns out to be one of his most potent:

Sajers recalls: “After my plane hit the German-held side of the village, I was just sitting in the dark on bed. I heard an excited soldier’s roar, a loud creak, followed by a scream of death and agony. The German girl took to the floor, looked at me for a long moment, then stood up and took off her helmet. The horror hit me deeply, not merely inasmuch as the shock was sudden and the force was violent, but in an extremely frightening way.

On August 19th, 1942, I had come back from my mission. I had crossed an impassable, uninhabited mountain in a night-time thunderstorm. It was a hot day.

I had come from an isolated village of six hundred people. I had no need for water, but as I got closer and closer to the forest the temperature became colder, the blood boiling, and the warmth of the air became an ever-present terror. The only way out was to stand in long, thick lines, then walk the whole way back to the hut where the machine was firing at me. This would mean moving on, but I had already made it to the other side of the mountain because I was already on the road heading the other way. When we approached the village at 11:30am, I felt the thickest chill of the night, something I hadn’t felt before on a post day before, and felt like something had happened to me, almost as if someone was coming after me. As soon as I got up I felt my legs shaking as ice broke from my ankles. At the time it had been cold – or as close to it as I could find. I was about to walk through it to get to my body but the cold was still there. I grabbed the handle of the machine for comfort, but the machine simply didn’t respond. It was as if this horrible feeling felt to me with a deep, powerful force. The heat of it could be felt from my ankle to my hip, making it impossible for me to walk. After a few moments I went back to my tent to get water. It was so cold it was almost difficult to eat, but the pain of not surviving it was great… the first and most difficult moments were over. We waited for an hour on edge – one of the most powerful men I saw on a post day in history – before we went back out of the tent and went to the bed in which we were sleeping – which is where we were sleeping tonight. We made our way straight into the hut, and to the side of the road the machine was firing at us. I was able to crawl up one of the many long rows of wooden stakes, the only part that was too tightly packed before my head was cut off. The machine was firing at the edge for 15 or 20 seconds. I reached the ground, stopped. Then I saw that my leg was dead and my head was broken – the machine had already killed me. I collapsed into the ground… I was taken to

Sajers recalls: “After my plane hit the German-held side of the village, I was just sitting in the dark on bed. I heard an excited soldier’s roar, a loud creak, followed by a scream of death and agony. The German girl took to the floor, looked at me for a long moment, then stood up and took off her helmet. The horror hit me deeply, not merely inasmuch as the shock was sudden and the force was violent, but in an extremely frightening way.

On August 19th, 1942, I had come back from my mission. I had crossed an impassable, uninhabited mountain in a night-time thunderstorm. It was a hot day.

I had come from an isolated village of six hundred people. I had no need for water, but as I got closer and closer to the forest the temperature became colder, the blood boiling, and the warmth of the air became an ever-present terror. The only way out was to stand in long, thick lines, then walk the whole way back to the hut where the machine was firing at me. This would mean moving on, but I had already made it to the other side of the mountain because I was already on the road heading the other way. When we approached the village at 11:30am, I felt the thickest chill of the night, something I hadn’t felt before on a post day before, and felt like something had happened to me, almost as if someone was coming after me. As soon as I got up I felt my legs shaking as ice broke from my ankles. At the time it had been cold – or as close to it as I could find. I was about to walk through it to get to my body but the cold was still there. I grabbed the handle of the machine for comfort, but the machine simply didn’t respond. It was as if this horrible feeling felt to me with a deep, powerful force. The heat of it could be felt from my ankle to my hip, making it impossible for me to walk. After a few moments I went back to my tent to get water. It was so cold it was almost difficult to eat, but the pain of not surviving it was great… the first and most difficult moments were over. We waited for an hour on edge – one of the most powerful men I saw on a post day in history – before we went back out of the tent and went to the bed in which we were sleeping – which is where we were sleeping tonight. We made our way straight into the hut, and to the side of the road the machine was firing at us. I was able to crawl up one of the many long rows of wooden stakes, the only part that was too tightly packed before my head was cut off. The machine was firing at the edge for 15 or 20 seconds. I reached the ground, stopped. Then I saw that my leg was dead and my head was broken – the machine had already killed me. I collapsed into the ground… I was taken to

Sajers recalls: “After my plane hit the German-held side of the village, I was just sitting in the dark on bed. I heard an excited soldier’s roar, a loud creak, followed by a scream of death and agony. The German girl took to the floor, looked at me for a long moment, then stood up and took off her helmet. The horror hit me deeply, not merely inasmuch as the shock was sudden and the force was violent, but in an extremely frightening way.

On August 19th, 1942, I had come back from my mission. I had crossed an impassable, uninhabited mountain in a night-time thunderstorm. It was a hot day.

I had come from an isolated village of six hundred people. I had no need for water, but as I got closer and closer to the forest the temperature became colder, the blood boiling, and the warmth of the air became an ever-present terror. The only way out was to stand in long, thick lines, then walk the whole way back to the hut where the machine was firing at me. This would mean moving on, but I had already made it to the other side of the mountain because I was already on the road heading the other way. When we approached the village at 11:30am, I felt the thickest chill of the night, something I hadn’t felt before on a post day before, and felt like something had happened to me, almost as if someone was coming after me. As soon as I got up I felt my legs shaking as ice broke from my ankles. At the time it had been cold – or as close to it as I could find. I was about to walk through it to get to my body but the cold was still there. I grabbed the handle of the machine for comfort, but the machine simply didn’t respond. It was as if this horrible feeling felt to me with a deep, powerful force. The heat of it could be felt from my ankle to my hip, making it impossible for me to walk. After a few moments I went back to my tent to get water. It was so cold it was almost difficult to eat, but the pain of not surviving it was great… the first and most difficult moments were over. We waited for an hour on edge – one of the most powerful men I saw on a post day in history – before we went back out of the tent and went to the bed in which we were sleeping – which is where we were sleeping tonight. We made our way straight into the hut, and to the side of the road the machine was firing at us. I was able to crawl up one of the many long rows of wooden stakes, the only part that was too tightly packed before my head was cut off. The machine was firing at the edge for 15 or 20 seconds. I reached the ground, stopped. Then I saw that my leg was dead and my head was broken – the machine had already killed me. I collapsed into the ground… I was taken to

There were two more attempted Russian air raids. The last victim I was to see was a dirty white horse.A Russian plane had been hit, and was disintegrating above us. We all watched as the forward part of the plane, whose racing engine gave off a long howl, plunged toward the ground. The noise terrified the animal, which slipped its collar and galloped, whinnying, toward the spot where the roaring mass of metal would land. It must have taken about three steps before it was hit Its flesh was scattered for over fifteen yards in all directions.

The white horses death is gruesome and disturbing, even through the eyes of a German soldier in the face of the destruction of an enemy aircraft. It is an image that evokes a sense of chaotic symmetry: good and bad intermingled–both manifested as types of destruction, the disintegration of the plane fatefully met with the explosion of the animal. Heroism, valor or victory are irrelevant factors in this scenario. It ends up simply being a big, bloody mess. This poetical last casualty that Sajer witnesses punctuates his entire view of war: It is hard, fast and devastating. The horse, a representation of Sajers own inner strength and spirit, sullied and bedraggled as it already was, is unable to survive the war. Most importantly, it is its sudden reaction to fear that sends it racing toward its own demise. By writing all of his war account in such a blunt and immediate way Sajer avoids the gloss of retrospect, showing us instead the impossibility of a soldier in the midst of fighting to even be thinking about what he is fighting for, or how courageously he is fighting for it. Instead he presents the hard notion that war itself is the invading enemy on the human spirit, and fear its vanguard.

Throughout the book we are shown several ways in which the fear that war provokes is extremely detrimental to Sajer and his comrades, one of which being its physiological effects. In one of the books characteristically candid, uncensored passages of inter-soldier dialogue, one of Sajers comrades, Wollers, exclaims that he has “had enough of giving orders, and sweating, and shitting in [his] pants like a baby when [hes] scared.” Sajer also provides a kind of general physical description of the vanquishing of ones spirit, as caused “when danger continues indefinitely.” As he explains it, “one collapses into an unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves and tears is only the beginning. Finally, one vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won.” Prolonged exposure to fear and danger leads to a tangible, observable series of symptoms that can best be described as the body giving up on life. This state exists independently of the squalor of wartime living and the numerous physical dangers that a given campaign might include–they are purely psychosomatic in nature, inspired not by the specifics of warfare but by the illusive “harassing fear” that it spawns.

The idea of a death-before-death seems to be the primary consequence of the soldiering life in Sajers opinion. The exploded white horse is a foreshadow for his own premature death of spirit–which had already been pushed to the limit so many times–caused by the separation from his best

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Poetical Last Casualty And Guy Sajers Experience. (October 4, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.freeessays.education/poetical-last-casualty-and-guy-sajers-experience-essay/